About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Friday, February 27, 2015

Recently, on a couple of other blogs, I’ve mentioned the
abandoned project (in Britain) that would enable content providers on the Web
(and probably smart phone apps) to label their content for age categories and
with respect to specific suitability areas (sexuality, violence), matched to
browser (or app interface) changes that would make the experience seamless for
most users. Current content
interstitials tend to suggest that the “hidden” content will be porn, which is
often not the case. The concept would be predicated on parents having multiple
phones or laptops in a household and setting them up differently.

Such a project would require a number of big players to form
a consortium (which, I know, is a bad word in itself given my experience with
CABCO and Medicare and Blue Cross in the early 1980s in Dallas). Involved would be browser and app suppliers
as well as the actual developers of the coding standards. Companies like Google (with Chrome and
platforms like YouTube and Blogger), Wordpress, Microsoft (IE), Firefox,
Motorola, Apple (for Safari and various iPhone apps), Facebook, and Twitter
would be involved. CABCO may be prescient in some challenging ways: the sponsoring Blue plans could not get along and the project was shelved in 1982 (right after I had left).

Leadership of such a project would need to be familiar in detail with the history of litigation over censorship (CDA, COPA), downstream immunity issues (Section 230 and DMCA), and the mechanics of how content is assembled and delivered (like video embeds).

This would be an opportunity also to look at innovative ways
to intercept some kinds of illegal and destructive content (like child
pornography, and recruiting for criminal or foreign enemy enterprises)
automatically. It could be an opportunity to look at constructive, move-forward ideas on piracy.

Of course, like CABCO, this would be a project where systems
analysts would need to think through what would be done and how everything
would work “in the real world” before coding started. So it would cost a lot to fund, staff and
head up. It could be housed in Silicon
Valley, maybe in a place like Austin or Dallas, maybe North Carolina (Research
Triangle), and would require travel to London and Europe, as well as a lot of
interface with media companies (mostly in New York and California, and
Canada).

It would employ a lot of people for a few years.

I am "retired" at 71 and working on my own content stuff (music and movies), but I do have a lot of the background that it would take to contribute to such a project, especially the requirements. If someone wants to do this, contact me.

Picture: Dallas,
where CABCO was in the 1980s (it was near Stemmons Freeway, near both downtown
and Oak Lawn).

Saturday, February 21, 2015

I got a bizarre warning of a memory error from “IAStoricon.exe”
today. This is the Intel Rapid Storage
Technology, from a reputable company of the same name.

But some references say that some Trojans or malware disguise
as this exe, as in this source.

However, “Answers that work” say that this program is
involved in hard disk monitoring. In my case, it may be responsible for phantom
“hard disk errors” that I sometimes get, as explained before, link here.

Update: Feb. 25

The "hybrid shutdown" of Windows 8 may also be a problem and cause false crashes, according to Askvg, link here. There seem to be problems with how 8 and 8.1 talk to the firmware of various manufacturers, especially HP and Toshiba.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

The recent fiasco over the Washington DC Metro accident
January 12, 2015, concerning the wrong direction in which the tunnel fans
directed the smoke from a third-rail insulation fire, has led, after an NTSB
report, to questions about Metro Transit software and the fact that the system
used by train controllers dates back to 2002.
There were plans to replace it, despite numerous upgrades, and apparent
awareness that it was difficult to use and could lead to operator errors.

The Washington Post story February 16 is by Mary Pat
Flaherty, Paul Duggan, and Mary Aratani, link here.

It sounded as if the system did not present the information
in a way that operators could rapidly use it.
This sounded like the old systems-analysis problem where user
requirements aren’t clearly stated in time when a system is developed. I have a relative who runs a company in Ohio that sells process-control software; I wondered if he knows anything about all this.

I had that experience in the early 1980s with a Blue Cross
consortium, but turf protection among the clients was a problem that got in the
way. That wouldn’t be a problem for a
transit system, hopefully.

There’s also a question of the kind of staff and contractors
hired. I would like to think that had I
been working at Metro on that system, I would have known of the dangers and
been meticulous enough to make sure this would not happen. Does this come down to the care of just one
employee on his job?

We call this “attention to detail”. I’m reminded of an event in 1991 when working
at USLICO (the foreshadow of ReliaStar) in Arlington, when another employee in
production control found a major flaw in the elevation procedure that no one
had noticed for over a year since getting a new source management system. That’s what having good employees means.

Monday, February 09, 2015

I wasn’t aware that Anthem, as affiliated with the Blue
Cross Blue Shield system, is actually a “for profit” and publicly traded
company after all, as explained in Wikipedia here.

I had worked for a consortium of six or seven Blue plans,
called CABCO, in Dallas from early 1979 until 1981. I left just before it folded. The intention of the project has been a Combined
Medicare A+B system, to compete with EDS.
At one time, the implementation date had been intended to be 1/1/80. Had the plans gotten along better and been
more progressive in thinking, there might have indeed been a system and a new
Medicare processing company in Dallas, even if it had subsequently gone through
all the usual pressures of corporate mergers and buyouts. Maybe I would have spent my entire career
there and would still be living in Texas.

I recall that we had a small data center with a small
mainframe (pre-4341), but in retrospect, the actual deployment of technology
(compared to earlier employment in NYC at Bradford and NBC and, in fact, Univac
– now Unisys) seemed primitive, leading to a particular incident in June 1981
that I think I’ve presented here before.
Perhaps that’s a clue to “Blue culture” and what is going on now.

Reed Abelson and Matthew Goldstein have a New York Times
article, “Anthem hacking points to security vulnerability of the health care industry”,
link here.

Anthem apparently did not protect its internal information with
encryption. But when I was working, most
of the legacy information was on mainframes, which were viewed as
impenetrable. Midtiers were usually on
Unix platforms (more like Mac); only end users had Windows at work
stations. However, companies were often
careless with elevation procedures, which started to be secured properly
through the late 1980s into the early 1990s.

I did get a lot of calls about jobs with MMIS and about HIPAA
in the period following my layoff. HIPAA
supposedly specified rigid standards in transporting medical data (as with XML
protocols) among computers, to protect patient privacy, which is not exactly
the same thing as real security. There
simply was not the attention to these issues when I was working that is needed
now.

I would actually have a job interview at the Texas Plan in the low-rise upside-down campus on Highway 175 in Richardson in November 1987.

Monday, February 02, 2015

Latest little misadventure came when I connected an LG
BluRay DVD Player to my HP Envy in Windows 8.1.

I had expected the driver to load automatically. Instead, it connected as Drive E, and brought
up PowerDVD. When I tried to play the
DVD, it forced me to update the software again, for $49.95. Is a license on a
DVD drive for only one machine?

Then it turned out that the option I chose played only standard
DVD’s. I had to pay again for the “expanded”
BluRay driver. I will call the vendor
and try to get a refund on the first one.

Furthermore, the next time you play another VuRay DVD it
goes back to standard unless you Restart Windows 8.1. All of that tells me that it is possible
that some of this has to do with Windows 8.1s tendency to lose track of some
kinds of drivers and pointers, requiring frequent restarts (and sometimes on HP
giving false-positive hard drive errors).
So it’s possible that this is a Windows 8 and not an LG problem. Then who is responsible for the extra
charges?

In the older Toshiba Satellite (which broke under warranty in August) the LG went onto the startup menu (in 8.0) and was always queried at startup.

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